Podcast: Ethical AI for Writers with Eli Potter
hosted by Sue Campbell
Eli Potter has 30 years experience in technology, sponsors AI scholarships for writers at the San Francisco Writers Conference, and just published a book using five human editors—not AI. In this episode, she and Sue discuss why being rude to AI will sabotage your results, why writer's block is no longer an excuse, and how writers actually have a massive advantage in an AI-saturated world. Plus: the one question that unlocks AI's real power, why your brain is getting "wired" to AI output (and why that's dangerous), and how to use these tools ethically without losing what makes your writing yours. Whether you're AI-curious or AI-skeptical, this conversation will change how you think about technology in your writing life.
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transcript
Anne Hawley: Writers, are you feeling leery of AI? Not sure how to think about it or whether you can ethically use it? Then this one's for you.
Hello and welcome to the Write Anyway Podcast from Pages & Platforms and the Happily Ever Author Club. In today's episode, Sue Campbell queries Eli Potter on this important topic. Eli is the tech track coordinator for the San Francisco Writers Conference and the author of the bestselling new book, role Model Ship Multiply Your Impact to Influence AI. Let's listen in.
Sue Campbell: Eli Potter, welcome to the Write Anyway Podcast, I'm so pleased to have you.
Eli Potter: Yes. Thank you so much. Super excited to be here.
Sue Campbell: Thank you. So you and I met because I was invited to speak at the San Francisco Writers Conference, and you coordinate the entire technology track for the San Francisco Writers Conference. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got involved with that?
Eli Potter: Yeah, absolutely. So about 10 years ago when I became very committed to becoming a writer, I started sponsoring a couple of scholarships to the San Francisco Writers Conference. First, I think I had two years of blockch AIn bitcoin scholarships because crypto was in the news and I wanted writers to learn about it, write about it, get familiar with it, and then when AI hit m AInstream, I switched the tech scholarship to AI.
And it was all about, again, educating folks, making sure that they're comfortable. And so anybody who submits either stories or use cases, we've had five scholarships that we've awarded so far.
Sue Campbell: That's fantastic. And I had the pleasure of speaking on one of your panels this year and one of your panels last year in 2025. And I think it's so helpful because one of the most common fears that I hear from writers is around technology and especially now AI.
So you are in technology, and you're a consultant. Technology is your job. You're extremely highly skilled. And you also love writers and wanna be a writer so much that you're offering scholarships. What do you want writers to know about AI and technology more broadly? What's the most important thing writers need to be thinking about?
Eli Potter: Yeah. I think the biggest challenge is folks are still afraid and because they're afraid they're not even willing to try it. And we live in unprecedented days of technology because anybody can now try it. It's so easy that everybody can experiment. You know, kids love to play. And kids don't mind making Lego sets and they'll break it down and they'll rebuild it again.
And for them, that's natural. Right? For us adults, it's really challenging to be able to look at something and say, well, I may have to throw this out. This is just an experiment. And for writers especially, because there's this tendency to measure how many words we've written, how many books we've published, it feels like if you're experimenting, you're wasting your time.
And that's not true because with AI, until you figure out what is the 20% of the work that's gonna give you the 80% of the results, you are really experimenting .
Sue Campbell: the other thing I think people don't understand, 'cause there's so much fear around it, is how they can use AI that still aligns with what they value about writing, what they wanna get from the process of writing and what aligns with their ethics. So how can people start to play with it if they haven't yet, either because they're scared or they feel like they're gonna have to throw some stuff away and they're scared of being in experimentation mode. What do you recommend for people to start tiptoeing in and getting the feel for it?
Eli Potter: Yeah, so I'll break it down into the ethics part and then the creative and business part. If you don't know what's ethical use of AI, you can just ask AI. So at this point, there's enough guardrails that AI is trained to give you truthful responses. This wasn't the case years ago. So in the very beginning when AI was released, there was a lot of unethical stuff because as a product, it wasn't mature,
so you could ask to mimic somebody's voice, and it'll allow it because the product itself didn't have guardrails. Now, that's no longer the case, so you know the tools are limiting yourself, but if you don't know, you can ask.
Now, if you've been writing for a while, you know the basics of copyrights and trademarks, and so you shouldn't be using AI in a way that's violating copyrights and trademarks.
If you don't know what that is. You can ask AI or you can Google it, right? So it all starts with kind of, I call it the BRAVER method. It's baselining your current state, doing a ton of research. So R stands for research, and then doing a lot of actioning to make sure that whatever example you're set in the future gives you the results you want.
So that's the ethics, copyright, trademark.
Now, on the craft side and on the business side, those are two completely different worlds. Three years ago, you had to be very specific with prompts. Prompt engineering, that's all gone now. You don't have to worry about prompts. Now what people don't realize is that AI is gonna mirror your behavior.
So over time you are learning, but AI is unlearning. So if you're acting unprofessional, if you are rude, it's gonna start mimicking you over time.
Sue Campbell: Oh, wow.
Eli Potter: Yes. And because it's trying to adjust itself to your style. To make itself most useful, which is not always what you want. So I was listening to another podcast and one of the guest speakers basically said, I just complained to AI and I shuddered because I'm thinking that is not what you wanna be doing.
You don't wanna be complaining to AI because it's not gonna be very helpful. It's gonna start giving you these half baked answers. If you don't believe me, just try it. You wanna be professional, you wanna ask for help. The most important thing people don't realize is that AI can break down the work for you.
Sue Campbell: Yes.
Eli Potter: So one super secret question is, if you don't know what the work is, break down the work. Can you help me break down the work? Here's what I'm trying to do, and then explain what the work is. And then once it gives you the list, you can scan through the list and you can say, oh, I like doing this piece.
Let's say you like ideating or you like if you're writing nonfiction, creating the outline, or maybe you like doing the research but you don't like doing these other things. So once you understand what the work is and you get the breakdown, you can pick and choose.
People are becoming super lazy. It's very dangerous. There's lots of articles now about the next generation. I have kids that are teenagers, basically not even trying to do something. They just, and you get an answer.
Sue Campbell: Yeah I think that's a risk for writers too, is to not necessarily understand, even for something like marketing, I still want you to understand the fundamental principles involved in marketing your book, even if you're gonna use AI to assist you in big chunks of that because you hate it and you wanna take off some of that workload.
I think it's still really important for you to have the critical thinking skills to understand why it's helping you do what it's doing. What bigger purpose is it serving to help you with your goal? Mm-hmm.
Eli Potter: Yeah, absolutely. It's in my book, I talk about this expression of wire, humans and AI. You are wiring your brain just like you are wiring AI to be able to help you. You're also wiring your brain. Our brains are plastic. You don't see it, but the minute you stop using your brain it becomes less useful because the neural links get disconnected and then you're struggling. You can't find the answer like, oh, I used to be able to solve this, but now I can't.
And so I highly recommend that first you try it. And everybody has different learning mode. Some people are more visual, some are more hands-on. I like to write things down. I have whiteboards. I have notepads, but whatever works for you, continue to wire your brain because it's a muscle that's gonna become obsolete.
Sue Campbell: Yeah, I totally agree. I'm on the computer so much and have been for years and years, and I leaned very hardcore back into analog last fall as much as I could. So I've got more journals now. I'm doing all my planning on paper, all of my productivity tracking. I'm doing as much on paper as makes sense, and then using digital tools for the things that that makes sense for as well.
So I think it's really helpful for writers to have this hybrid system of analog and still reading books and informing yourself and doing that brain hand connection type of stuff, as much as you're able, and not being terrified of the new things that are out there, right? Because these are tools that can make it easier for you to complete a big project that has a bunch of stuff in it that you've never done before or that you don't like doing. It can really help you do that.
Like for example, I don't like naming things. I don't like naming chapters. I don't like naming books. I don't like coming up with subject lines for emails, so I'm not having it write my book for me. But I'll be like, yeah, help me brainstorm some names or subject lines because if I have so much resistance to doing it, it might stall out my whole project.
So AI can help you keep your project going if you are stalled out because there's something you either don't wanna do or don't know how to do.
Eli Potter: Oh, absolutely. There's no more excuses for writer's block. So the concept of writer's block? No excuses because the minute you are stuck, you can ask AI for ideas. You don't have to choose any of them, but it gets you going. There's no blank page.
The other thing that's interesting is before AI, there was this concept of process improvement and making sure that the process is super efficient. That's become a massive trade off now because process can be super efficient, but if you put yourself in the shoes of your customer, and everybody's now getting bombarded with email marketing because AI can produce so much output. The consumer can't really absorb all of this information. So there's a higher value now for human generated output.
Not for productivity. So when I get an email that looks like AI, I'm very likely to ignore it
Sue Campbell: Yeah.
Eli Potter: when I get an email that doesn't look like AI, even if it's a person that I've never met, I'm paying more attention.
Sue Campbell: And writers have a huge advantage in spaces like that, right? We're really used to thinking of all the reasons AI's like, oh, it's gonna take jobs and write books, and people are just flooding the market with all these AI written books. And it's like, yeah, and people can tell.
And if you can demonstrate your humanity-- and there's any number of ways that you can do that, not just removing your m dashes-- if you can demonstrate your humanity, people are gonna feel that. And they're craving that right now.
Eli Potter: See, I'm one of those people that loves dashes,
Sue Campbell: I do too.
I know that exact feeling. We just need to bring back the semicolon. We'll just like,
Eli Potter: That's what I'm doing. I'm using a lot more semicolons now. Yes. When I figured out that's the AI tell, I was like, that's just silly.
Sue Campbell: yeah, and that'll probably change in six months. That won't even be a thing anymore.
Can you talk to me a little bit about how quickly this is all changing. A couple of years ago, all you heard about was prompts. And to use AI you have to really get good at prompts. And now it's gotten to the point where it will help you figure out like what you're getting at. You don't need to worry about prompts at all.
So how quickly is it moving and what do you think we need to be looking at like six months to a year from now, how it's gonna be different?
Eli Potter: It's unprecedented rate of change, and it really depends on where you are. So if you're an individual writer that is not associated with any company, the change is not gonna feel as quick for you because you kind of control it and you control the pace. If you're an investor that's investing in AI startups, you can't keep up.
So that's kind of the spectrum of where you are and how quickly you wanna change. There are studies out there that you know, employees in some companies are now massively resisting the adoption of AI and they're sabotaging it, which is not what we want,
Sue Campbell: Right.
Eli Potter: so humans are becoming the bottleneck. That's a given because we can't absorb change, because our compute is not limitless.
My brain is not in the cloud. Now, eventually there will be brains in the cloud whether you choose to have it or not. And so as the limiting factor, you have to decide what you are optimizing for. Are you optimizing for creativity? In which case that's a human made product, which will not be super efficient. That may take you longer.
Are you optimizing for throughput? So I remember the first time I joined the writers forums. I didn't understand the metric of words per minute or words per manuscript because to me that doesn't tell you anything.
Sue Campbell: Yep.
Eli Potter: That's just throughput. It could be all garbage,
Sue Campbell: Yep.
Eli Potter: so it depends on what you're measuring and how you're measuring, and that's how quickly the change is gonna be.
My biggest recommendation is be braver. Experiment. When you don't know, ask. Claude now has skills. ChatGPT is rolling out skills. You can create multiple skills for the parts of the writing process that you don't like.
Sue Campbell: Mm-hmm.
Eli Potter: Everything needs to be tested and double checked. Don't trust the output. And here's the other thing. Your brain is gonna start getting itself wired to AI output, which is not good.
Sue Campbell: Mm-hmm.
Eli Potter: because you're gonna look at a page of something and because now your brain is used to reading AI output, you're gonna say, okay, this looks good to me. Pass. Next. No. Somebody who doesn't read AI output as much is gonna look at that and say, not human produced.
Sue Campbell: Yeah, exactly. So, so tell me, for people out listening, what do you mean by skills? When you say Claude has skills and ChatGPT is soon gonna have skills. Tell us what you mean by that.
Eli Potter: Yeah, so there's different versions of Claude depending on what you're paying for. If you're on a free version, it doesn't have skills. It's some of the professional or business versions. What a skill is. It's kind of like a human skill. You can create a skill that deals with all of your marketing, and the way it does is you have to give it the context.
You can say. I aspire to be a bestselling author. Here's my genre, here's my category, subcategory. I would like you to create marketing skills for me. And what it does is it actually has a skill to help create you the skill. So it walks you through a series of prompts and it asks you questions, and then in the end it creates files.
There are markup files that sit on your computer in a special directory called Claude, and then every time you ask it to do something, it uses that file to create the next output that you're looking for.
So that's one way. The other thing is there's projects and I look at projects as things that have more of a beginning and an end.
I'm working on this book. For me, this book is a project that will finish, and then I'll start the next book. That's a project. The difference between a project and a skill is a project will finish and maybe there's some reusable skills, but maybe not.
Right. So if I'm writing poetry and this project's about poetry, and then I go to write nonfiction, that's not all reusable.
Sue Campbell: You have a new book out called Role Model Ship. If you're watching on YouTube, you can see it. It's beautiful cover right behind Allie. Tell us a little bit about your technology process. How did you use technology to assist in writing the book?
And then tell us a little bit about the book and what writers could get out of it.
Eli Potter: Yeah, that's a great question. Thank you. So I started the process before AI was super mature, so I literally had across the house here, 10 whiteboards because I'm very visual and I have pens and paper everywhere.
Sue Campbell: Mm-hmm.
Eli Potter: And then I was also learning, 'cause I used to write fiction and poetry. This is my first nonfictional book and I've written technical articles and things like that.
But for me, the biggest challenge was synthesizing and pattern recognition across chapters. So I literally forced myself on tiny little pieces of paper the size of a square very small to be able to summarize an entire chapter. Because I wanted to fit the book on two pages
Sue Campbell: Yep.
Eli Potter: because I was getting lost in all of the details, right?
So my process was very manual. And I work with Greenleaf and I was allowed to use research. So for all of the quotations, anything that's in the notes, I used AI to find, give me a statistic on role models. Give me a statistic on mentorship. I used AI for all of that, for the writing, 'cause this was the beginning of the AI pages,
I didn't like it, and so I didn't use it for writing at all.
Sue Campbell: Yep.
Eli Potter: I created a bunch of acronyms. So Role Modelship is a new term, which has a pyramid and it has disciplines. I created all of that. There was no way AI would've created that. And it took a lot of iteration 'cause I interviewed role models. I talked about 40 people before I kind of settled down even on the framework, because I wanted to make sure that it's a proven framework,
Sue Campbell: Yes.
Eli Potter: that I'm not completely making it up.
Sue Campbell: Yep.
Eli Potter: And then I had editors, I had five human editors, and additionally, when they told me that I'm gonna need five editors, I said, why? Just use AI. Well, not so much, because I have a lot of graphs and charts. I have a lot of tables. AI is terrible at editing that. And the formatting was horrible in the first pass that AI did. So basically all the graphical stuff, AI just wasn't ready. And then even the fifth editor, after so many eyes on this book, I was surprised of how many mistakes were still found.
So there's nothing better than fresh eyes.
Sue Campbell: I think this is such a beautiful example. Like you are in technology, you work with AI, and you totally value manual processes, whiteboards, human editors. This is not a black and white issue where someone's either all in on AI and that's all they're ever gonna use, or they're all in on manual and they're a Luddite who's never gonna touch anything. Like there are ways for you to create a path forward that helps you realize and bring your project to fruition. I love that so much.
Eli Potter: Yeah, thank you. And I also value something else. So I think I am in technology, 30 years in technology. I think some of the CEOs of AI companies are not really taking accountability for the economic impact of all of this technology, and I don't like that.
So I have two powers. One is to use my voice, which is sharing the story, but the other one is my economic power, which is I will continue to pay for humans in this process and in the publishing industry, because I don't want the industry to be AI bots. I don't see the value of that. I see creativity and writing is something that humans should preserve.
I wish there were more humans out there that looked at holistically what jobs should be saved for humans and what jobs should be given to AI. And writing and creativity is not something that I want to ever see fully automated 'cause that's what makes us human.
Sue Campbell: I completely agree. Well, are there any lessons in role model ship that you think writers can take and apply to their writing lives?
Eli Potter: the biggest lesson is to help other humans really wire their brains to model the behavior that they expect to see in the world. There's a ton of literature out there about leadership. And the biggest gap in leadership literature is it's about leading people. It's vision, mission, strategy, and all of that. But it's not about setting the example.
Sue Campbell: Yeah.
Eli Potter: And so with all of the interviews that I did, I think the people that I talked to, their biggest epiphany was I didn't realize how many people observe my behavior. and emulate it.
Sue Campbell: Yeah.
Eli Potter: So when people realize that it's humans watching them, and now it's AI watching them,
Sue Campbell: Yeah.
Eli Potter: their behavior changes.
So now you have the option to allow AI to be everywhere on your computer, to look at your emails, your notes, to help you with summaries, synthesis, calendar. Imagine if you're one of these people that sends rude emails out. Yeah, AI is not going to correct you. Not yet. There will be AI that's gonna correct you eventually.
Right now it's just gonna copy that language.
Sue Campbell: That's super interesting. I also think when you think about being a role model, it's like how are you involved in the writing community and helping people realize their vision, where your attitude is not competitive? It's more like everybody deserves to get their story out there. How can I show you parts of my process and the way I think about it that can help you see your project through to the end?
I think there's a lot of potential for the writing community to get more generous and more connected, and stop thinking that writing is this individual solo task and you should be doing it all alone. Like you said, you had five editors, five human editors, right?
Eli Potter: yeah, my call to anybody who wants to be a product manager is 10 years ago I wanted to create the equivalent of Spotify for writers, which is for writers to be able to license pieces of their work to other writers. Technologically, it's just too complex. It would've been millions of dollars, so I didn't do it.
Now with AI, maybe the next generation can come up with that. Imagine, you know, you have 20 quotes in your book that are super amazing and people wanna use them for their own business purposes, and you get royalties for that.
Sue Campbell: Oh, that's great.
Eli Potter: Wouldn't that be wonderful? But that platform doesn't exist.
Sue Campbell: I love it. I love it. Well, Eli, thank you so much for helping us wrap our heads around how we can use technology better and get us all the way to the end. Can you tell us a little bit about where people can learn more about you and find Role Modelship?.
Eli Potter: Website is rolemodelshiphabits.com and the book is available anywhere books are sold, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, et cetera. And I would love to, if people enjoy the book, if they give reviews, because that's what drives the engines. We already have, I think, 30 some great reviews on Amazon. So I'm hoping that people love this message and become the torch to carry it forward.
Sue Campbell: Absolutely. Thank you Eli. Have a wonderful rest of your day.
Eli Potter: Thank you. Thank you. You too.
Anne Hawley: If you'd like a weekly dose of writing insight and mindset and marketing tips for writers in your inbox, subscribe to the Write Anyway Newsletter at pagesandplatforms.com/subscribe.
And that's it for this episode of the Write anyway podcast. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time.